Did 527 GOTVers warn about WRONG pens to mark Optiscans?

Did any one of these groups hand out flyers to explain to voters who marked optiscan ballots to use the correct markers? Warning Ohioans about hanging chads and making sure they didn't get a prepunched ballot?

Some were handed alcohol based ink pens that do not get read by the optiscan tabulators.

Laura Flanders had a caller on Air America, a Native American who was said he was handed a PEN by an election worker in AZ and the instructions said to use a PENCIL to mark the ballot.

Perhaps spoilage rate in Native American/African American/Hispanic precincts might tell something.

white skin color...give pencil so ballot reads in tabulator
brown skin color...give pen so ballot doesn't.

I know I read of allegations (sorry, have no idea exactly where, but it was on or linked to DU) that Democratic-leaning Ohio precincts might have been given a different paper-weight Optiscan ballot, that the machines didn't read as well. (You know how Blackwell likes to pay attention to those paper weights.)

Someone probably has info on number of spoiled ballots per county or even per precinct? I know Dem precincts usually have more spoiled ballots. Maybe there are more votes there for Kerry than we thought.

and that is easily proven and worthy of a Civil Rights voting rights lawsuit.

Here's an interesting story from Seminole County, Florida.


http://www.local6.com/news/3883420/detail.html

excerpt:
Ballots Found Wet In Seminole County

SANFORD, Fla. -- Several hundred ballots in Seminole County, Fla., mysteriously got wet and were rejected by voting machines Tuesday, according to Local 6 News.

The wet ballots were apparently discovered unmarked Tuesday at the Community United Methodist Church in Casselberry, Fla.

The Supervisor of Elections, Dennis Joyner, said he does not know how the ballots became wet, Local 6 News reported. He said ballots were dry when the boxes were shipped out of the office, according to the report.

Also, the region has not seen rain this week.

I wondered about that too. On my early ballot the instructions said "use pencil", but then on the ballot itself the instructions printed in block red letters said "use black pen". Instead of mailing my ballot in, I went to the early voting location and waiting in line for 1 hour to ask the election worker which writing implement of the two was the "real deal" and which was the dummy designed to defraud democrats of their vote. She said either would work, and handed me a black pen. They didn't want people to use felt pens which would bleed through the paper and spoil votes for other offices, or pretty gel ink colored pens which wouldn't be read.
The instructions were written by an idiot, they specified contradictory information, and they pissed me off; but at least in this particular case in AZ there was no racist plot.

.......you voted on the Diebold AccuVote System which definitely IS calibrated to either a pen or a pencil. The machines WILL NOT reliably detect BOTH! If you are in one of the nine counties that used the Diebold system, she lied to you.

ballot was actually counted. There really should not be two instructions-one to use pens, the other to use pencils, for the same ballot.

FOIA request the actual ballots in problematic precincts and look for use of pen vs. pencil. We may find higher spoilage rates in those precincts, but then we need to see if they ended up in the count anyway. If they are not in the count a court action similar to the People for the American Way's suit in Ohio could be filed to force them to count the valid votes regardless of writing utensil type. :) Wouldn't that be something! -G

Can't pencil be erased easily?

This from a worker at the Registrar of Voters Office in San Diego, where I used early voting on a Diebold optical scanner the day before the election! Where do we report this stuff?

<http://shadowbox.i8.com/stolen.htm>

www.votersunite.org

I figured technology has improved and they don't need to be #2 pencils like in the old days. Can we get someone in the know to say whether pens were ok.

I'm sure they were. Otherwise, that would be just too simple to pull off fraud...

Kick.

poll workers? I mean, really, I don't think it is likely that the people working the polls would be instructed to give a pen to people of one race and a pencil to people of the other, for surely that would imply that everyone working the polls was a Republican who wanted to defraud the people. I do not believe poll workers, Republican or otherwise, would have gone along with those kind of instructions. No, I do not believe this was a method used to defraud. The methods to defraud were much more sly and underhanded and limited in who was privy to what was going on.